NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) -- As New Yorkers mark both Pride Month and this year's 400th anniversary of New York City, what was life like for LGBTQ+ people in the many years before the Stonewall Uprising of 1969?
Home to Indigenous people like the Lenape for thousands of years, the island of Manhattan was settled by Dutch colonists as New Amsterdam in 1624 before the British conquered the city and renamed it New York in 1664.
While LGBTQ+ people have existed throughout history, their individual experiences were shaped by the period in which they lived. In the case of the early U.S., many such experiences, whether fleeting encounters or lifelong relationships, were hidden and lost to time. It's in the last century that this history really began to fall into place, with people and places too numerous, and stories too vibrant, to explore in a single article.
"I tend to side with the view that you can't really talk about a gay culture or a queer culture, community really until pretty recently in history, including American history," said Benjamin Serby, a historian and visiting assistant professor at Adelphi University Honors College.
"The sort of identities of gay and straight and bisexual and so forth didn’t really take shape until the late 19th century or into the 20th century," he said. "It was kind of a gradual and uneven process."
It can also be difficult to translate the identities of people who lived under centuries-old social structures and gender norms with our modern viewpoints.
"It's like looking into a very strange world from our perspective, where in some ways, maybe actually there was a great deal more fluidity," Serby said.
While homosexuality was criminalized in colonial America, prosecution was uneven, and the lives of gay people would've varied based on factors like where they lived or their social status.
For example, General Baron von Steuben, a Revolutionary War hero who served as George Washington's chief of staff, is believed to have been openly gay by 18th century standards.
But even the less wealthy and powerful likely found some freedom to explore their sexuality in the burgeoning hub of commerce at the tip of Manhattan.
As a major trading post, New York drew a diverse mix of economic migrants. Unlike the small villages that dotted colonial America, this cosmopolitan atmosphere would've created a more liberal attitude towards the sexual transgressions of the time.
And while sodomy was punishable by death—such cases are documented in New Amsterdam—in practice, such laws appear to have been rarely enforced. In the bustling wharves and waterfront saloons and boarding houses of a city dominated by male laborers, homosexual encounters could flourish.
"There was a looser attitude towards not just religious practice but towards private behavior, including sexuality [in New York]," Serby said. "It just wasn't as much of a matter of panic and concern, as it would have been in, say, Massachusetts [Bay Colony]."
Same-sex relationships and other undercurrents of queer life didn't manifest into visible communities as we know them today.
"The ability for people to establish an identity and a kind of life for themselves based around their sexual desires—like that's not really something they had the freedom to do, most people, until very recently in history," Serby said. "Simply because people lived by and large in the villages and were highly surveilled by their families, by their neighbors."
"The sort of anonymity of the large urban center and the freedom that wage labor gave to mostly men, and mostly white men—that doesn't really happen until the late 19th century," he said.
The subject area is still being researched and debated among historians, but homosexuality did appear to become more visible, and gay subcultures more distinct, in the late 1800s with clubs like the Black Rabbit and the Slide on Bleecker Street.
The history is uneven and complex; for example, men generally had greater social freedom and economic mobility than women, allowing gay male communities to come into focus sooner. But a lesbian history was also taking shape; an example in the early 1900s is "Boston marriages," an arrangement in which women lived together, essentially as partners, and were largely accepted by their communities.
"It's fair to say more research has been done into the sort of formation of a gay male subculture," Serby said. "But I think whenever you look for one, you also end up finding a lesbian subculture. The question is just how large, like on what scale are we talking?"
At the turn of the 20th century, a flourishing gay subculture and lesbian subculture became more visible, including with the "Pansy Craze" in the 1920s and 30s, during which gay, lesbian and transgender performers would take to the stages of night spots in Harlem and Greenwich Village.
"There were these giant, festive, costumed spectacles," Serby said. "Heterosexuals would attend. They were racially integrated."
Among the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance was Gladys Bentley, a lesbian blues singer who donned men's clothing and flirted with women in the audience as she performed.
But this increased visibility would flounder post-Prohibition, as a raft of new laws and regulations took aim at so-called radicals and deviants and enforced rigid sex and gender conformity. By the 1950s, the federal government purged gay people from federal positions during the "Lavender Scare" and psychiatry was used to stigmatize homosexuality as a mental illness. This moral panic led to discrimination in everything from housing to employment.
Queer communities endured in places like New York in the mid-20th century, despite the threat of persecution and police raids. There were drag balls and gay bars. This came after many young people got a "tremendous amount of exposure" during World War II, Serby said, citing historian John D'Emilio, who called the war a "nationwide coming out experience" for LGBTQ+ people.
"I mean, you're talking about just millions and millions of people—many of whom still live in small farming communities or just towns that are quite restrictive—being drafted and moved around the country," Serby said. "They're going through cities like New York or L.A. or San Francisco, just exposure to like gay bars, gay culture, gay communities."
"That really changes the gay world, because after the war, many people remain in cities like New York, they don't go back home," he said. "The gay community is just much larger after the Second World War."
As the middle of the 20th century, "there's kind of a mix of freedom and real fear of that freedom being taken away," Serby added. "That's the reality in which a gay liberation movement emerges in the 60s."
Fifty-five years ago, on June 28, 1969, a police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in Greenwich Village, sparked protests known as the Stonewall Uprising.
The demonstrations led to what is widely regarded as the first Pride march a year later, as well as the larger LGBTQ+ rights movement—activism that was solidified during the AIDS crisis and built upon through the present day.
And while the queer community has become a durable part of New York City's political, social and cultural life, there's an uncertainty for some of the freedoms and rights that have been won, especially beyond New York.
"A lot of the same bigotry and oppression that was used against gay people for much of their history in this city and beyond it is now very much being wielded at trans people, who are also part of this story from the very beginning as well, and an unrecognized part of it," Serby said.
